Walkman's latest version and a new camera from Panasonic

By RICK MARTIN

It was not without a little sadness that we witnessed the end of Sony's Walkman cassette model last year. Sure it was a long time coming, but the Walkman brand is only rivaled by the iPod in the history of portable music. Thankfully, the brand still lives on in more modern Sony products. The latest of these was revealed earlier this month, as the company announced its new Walkman B Series.

This new Walkman series (the NWZ-B160/B160F) of mp3 players is very reminiscent of Apple's popular iPod Shuffle line. They're tiny, they're available in a wide range of bright colors, and they have a convenient clip on the back.

The B Series is an elongated player nearly reaching 10 cm in length, and weighing just 28 grams. Sony claims the player has an 18-hour battery life, and that a three-minute quick-charge will result in 90 minutes of playback time. A full charge requires about 70 minutes. The player also features a backlit LCD that pulses in time with the music it's playing.

The player connects to your PC using a built-in USB connector, and from there you can just drag and drop your music files. The B Series comes in both two- and four-gigabyte capacity models, so they can store nearly 500 and 1,000 songs respectively. Sony has also implemented something called "Zappin" search technology, which should help when sorting through your music library.

This new B Series looks far better than the earlier W Series, which was probably an attempt at differentiation gone awry, with the mp3 player built into the headphones themselves. Besides the B Series' more logical design, it has a number of other features that make it a decent Shuffle alternative.

The B Series will be released first in the United Kingdom, with the two- and four-gigabyte models selling for about ￡29 and ￡35 respectively (or $47, $57).

Continuing with its successful G Series of Micro Four Thirds (MFT) cameras, Panasonic this month announced its Lumix DMC-G3, following on the popular G2 and G1 models before it. Filling that middle ground between full-size DSLR and compact point-and shoot cameras, Panasonic's line of relatively compact, interchangeable-lens cameras has hit a sweet spot among many photographers.

The new G3 features a 16 megapixel sensor, and according to Panasonic the Venus Engine FHD image-processor brings 66 percent more noise reduction. It can also shoot full HD video at 1920 x 1080 pixels, in AVCHD format, a standard jointly developed by Panasonic and Sony.

In addition to an eye-level viewfinder, the G3 has a convenient 3-inch LCD touchscreen on the back but, unlike the G2, this panel is articulating, with the capability to rotate and tilt. This should certainly come in handy if you need to reach over a crowd to fire off a shot. When you need to adjust focus on an object, simply give a tap to the desired object on the screen and the Auto Focus (AF) will track that subject.

The touchscreen also features a slider-enabled background defocusing and white balance, as well as touch-enabled exposure control compensation,

The external dial controls include familiar modes such as Program, Shutter or Aperture Priority and Manual, but also include custom setting for Scene Mode and Creative Control Mode. There's a video button included as well for easy switching to video mode.

The new Lumix is made of aluminum and will be available in black, red, white, and brown (yes, brown!). The camera body with the 14-42mm zoom lens kit will retail for $699.99 this June. No word yet on a date for a Japan release.

article source : www.japantimes.co.jp

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Posted in: Gadgets,Technology

Exposure of Tepco pair exceeds limit "Cumulative dose of workers over new crisis cap of 250 millisieverts"

Two Tokyo Electric Power Co. employees working at the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant may have been exposed beyond the 250-millisievert limit set for the crisis, Tepco and the government said Monday.

The two men, one in his 30s and the other in his 40s, have been at the plant since the March 11 disasters triggered the crisis. Both may have a cumulative exposure of several hundred millisieverts, a company official said, while adding the two are "not at a stage that would require emergency medical treatment."

To cope with the country's worst nuclear plant crisis, the government raised the legal limit on the amount of radiation a worker can be exposed to in emergencies to 250 milliseiverts from 100 millisieverts.

The National Institute of Radiological Sciences is expected to conduct a detailed assessment of the workers' internal exposure to determine their total exposure, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, spokesman of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

The two workers were involved in work at reactors 3 and 4. In a measurement on May 23, their thyroid glands were found to have absorbed 7,690 and 9,760 becquerels of radioactive iodine-131, respectively, 10 times more than other workers.

Their external exposure levels were between 74 and 89 millisieverts, Tepco said.

The two were working in the plant's reactor control room, a building where the headquarters for the crisis is located, and outside in the compound.

They ingested stable iodine on March 13 to prevent radioactive iodine from accumulating in their thyroids and increasing their risk of thyroid cancer.

Tepco said it plans to check some 150 other workers who were engaged in similar work.

The utility is meanwhile coming to believe that it will be impossible to stabilize the crisis by the end of the year, senior company officials said Sunday. This could effect the evacuees' chances of returning to their homes near the plant.

The recent confirmation that meltdowns had occurred in reactors 1 to 3 and probably breached the pressure vessels encasing the fuel, have led officials to believe "there will be a major delay to work" to contain the situation, one of them said, adding that they will try to close the breaches.

Tepco announced April 17 that its time line for bringing the troubled reactors into cold shutdown was six to nine months.

Source Article : http://www.japantimes.co.jp

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Posted in: Quick News

2012 Release For Windows 8, Ballmer Reiterates

At a Microsoft Developer Forum in Japan today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed what we’ve all been assuming: the company plans to release Windows 8 in 2012, just about three years after the release of Windows 7.
Unfortunately, that’s as specific as the famously enthusiastic CEO cared to be, and no new features or details about the release were discussed, though we can glean some tidbits from his remarks.
First, as evidenced by the upcoming ARM port of Windows, one of Windows 8′s focuses is adaptability and modularity – more than any previous version of the OS, Windows 8 will be written to power everything from tablets to netbooks to high-end workstations, or as Ballmer put it, ”Windows 8 slates, tablets, PCs, a variety of different form factors.”
Ballmer went on to talk about the need for more intuitive computing, in the form of hardware and software that can more accurately respond to natural input instead of arcane search terms: “Today on a PC, it’s file open, blah, blah, blah, respond, reply, forward. I can’t just say to my device, get me ready for my trip to Tokyo,” Ballmer said. ” We ought to make it so that the search engines, and the user interface of the device can take actions on our behalf.”
This is a theme that Microsoft has focused on before, especially in some of its ads for the Bing search engine. In Windows 8, it’s possible that these innovations will come in the form of more reliable and pervasive voice recognition, or perhaps through tighter integration with Bing itself (though this sort of cross-pollination could draw the ire of antitrust regulators).
So, there we have it: More proof that Windows 8 is on its way, right from the horse’s mouth. If the Windows 8 development cycle continues to mirror that of Windows 7, we should get an increasing amount of official information this summer (perhaps beginning at the All Things D conference) leading up to a public beta later in the year or in early 2012.
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Source Article : http://windows8news.com/

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Posted in: Invention and Innovation,Technology